The Growth of Woodland Area within the United Kingdom (1998-2024)

Data Source

This project is focused on visualising various changes in woodland within the United Kingdom between March 31st of 1998 and 2024 respectively. The raw data and logo for this project were retrieved from ‘Forest Research’, a branch of the Forestry Commission (FC) which collects data by totaling extractions made from multiple forest services operating within the United Kingdom. It principally gathers information on tree-related statistics, including but not limited to gathering longitudinal provisional data on the estimated amount of woodland area in the UK.

The “Woodland area, UK, 1998 to 2024” ODS file contains 5 sheets of actual data, though was supplemented with cover, content and notes pages. In tandem, the pages containing data were annotated with further notes clarifying the origin of the data and different commissions involved in gathering it. The pages containing data split woodland area based on whether it was coniferous or deciduous, private or public sector, and reported total estimated woodland per country and in the United Kingdom as a whole.

Glimpse of the Raw Data …

Now after Processing …

The Research Question(s)

The main rationale for exploring this data was to elucidate various visual patterns within the growth of woodland area across the United Kingdom from 1998 to 2024. This includes creating a static visualisation of absolute numeric increase, annotated with the rate (percentage increase) of development, as well as more advanced interactive visualisations which show specific patterns in coniferous or deciduous, public or private woodland.

Calculating the percentage increase was important to contextualise the proportional rate of growth for each country, beyond simply interpreting development based on raw numeric increase in hectares of woodland. Furthermore, following this up with interactive visualisations allowed more precise dissemination of whether patterns of development were distinct depending on tree type (i.e. coniferous or deciduous) and woodland ownership (i.e. public or private land).

While the previous basic plot was initially taken from a Data Science Project completed during my Master’s studies, the following code demonstrates a more recent attempt at configuring and advancing upon my previous abilities with data management and visualisation. Also, now that we’ve already gone through the process of showing a more general composition of woodland development from 1998-2024, it could be curious to investigate how this could differ based on land ownership and tree type.

Generally, these visualisations tend to indicate that private woodland area has grown at a much more visually noticeable rate than public woodland, even after accounting for the differences in initial proportions by creating graphs with relative scales. This could be curious for motivating investigations into WHY this is happening (i.e. privatisation of forested areas for production purposes, higher funding for development, etc.) or even whether this difference is statistically significantly different in the first place. Regardless, it was entertaining to play around with the data to show this.

And just as a final tidbit, there is an interactive barplot below showing all of the used data, combining private and public woodland statistics to show a more general trend on the total amount of woodland area as denoted by whether it was coniferous or deciduous, per country, per year from 1998-2024. This could also be interpreted as a more advanced version of our original static plot. :)

Full Data Reference

Forest Research (2024, March 31). Tools and Resources: Data Downloads. https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statistics/data-downloads/